by Jim Marrs
However, security work was not the only activity in which Mertz became involved. Even before saving de Gaulle, Mertz had become one of France’s biggest heroin smugglers, according to Newsday, which cites numerous French police and court records. It is known in intelligence circles that de Gaulle often turned his back on drug smuggling, particularly if it involved people he was indebted to for their work against either the Nazis or the OAS.
One of Mertz’s contacts in both heroin smuggling and the French secret service was a man named Christian David, a petty hoodlum who had escaped a French prison and later was recruited into French intelligence for use against the OAS. According to Newsday and other knowledgeable sources, David was one of the men involved in the 1965 murder of Moroccan opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka.
In 1972, Barka’s murder—which is still officially unsolved—was brought up when David was arrested in Brazil and charged with being a member of a smuggling ring that had imported more than 1,000 pounds of heroin into the United States over a three-year period.
After his arrest in Brazil, David was extradited to the United States and sentenced to twenty years in prison for heroin smuggling. He didn’t stay there long. In 1975, when the Senate Intelligence Committee began looking into the CIA’s “Executive Action” program, David was ordered extradited back to France and was taken out of the country.
The committee was especially concerned with the agency’s Executive Action program because it was established to commit assassinations. The program was part of the operational arm of the CIA’s Technical Services Division and was code-named ZR/RIFLE.
Former CIA director Richard Helms spoke at length about ZR/RIFLE to the committee. Two members of the ZR/RIFLE team were identified by Helms only by their CIA cryptonyms—WI/ROGUE and QJ/WIN. According to evidence gathered by the committee, WI/ROGUE was a French Corsican, a stateless soldier of fortune and a criminal. This man approached QJ/WIN and attempted to recruit him into the CIA’s assassination program. Although it was never learned whether this recruitment effort was successful, there is evidence that it was.
Declassified CIA notes concerning the ZR/RIFLE project state:
4. Operational assets:
(1.) Personnel: QJ/WIN is under written contract as a principal agent, with the primary task of spotting agent candidates. QJ/WIN was first contacted in [deleted by CIA], in conjunction with an illegal narcotics operation into the United States. For a period of a year and a half, he was contacted sporadically by CIS Lucien Conein [who later became chief of foreign intelligence for the Drug Enforcement Agency] on behalf of the Bureau of Narcotics. Files of this bureau reflect an excellent performance by QJ/WIN.
Helms said this about QJ/WIN, “If you needed somebody to carry out murder, I guess you had a man who might be prepared to carry it out.”
Until the Senate hearings, the ZR/RIFLE program and its agents, WI/ROGUE and QJ/WIN, were among the CIA’s most closely guarded secrets. Several separate sources familiar with both intelligence operations and drug smuggling claim that WI/ROGUE and Christian David are one and the same. This claim is further supported by David’s own admission of intelligence associations and by his convenient extradition to France in 1985.
The association of David and Mertz, coupled with their descriptions and backgrounds, which match those of the CIA agents, suggests that QJ/WIN was Michael Victor Mertz, who also used the name Jean Soutre.
If all this isn’t complicated enough, QJ/WIN even had a tenuous connection with Jack Ruby—in the person of Thomas Eli Davis III.
Tom Howard, Ruby’s first attorney, asked his client if there were anyone the prosecution might produce who could damage Ruby’s defense of momentary insanity. Ruby hesitantly came up with the name “Davis.” Ruby said Davis had first approached him about using some of Ruby’s strippers in pornographic movies, but that later the two had become involved in gunrunning activities.
The FBI told the Warren Commission they could not locate such a person. However, the CIA did—and still does—have a classified file on Thomas Eli Davis III.
Veteran newsman Seth Kantor details Ruby’s connection to Davis in his book Who Was Jack Ruby? Born to a respectable Texas rancher couple on August 27, 1936, Davis was discharged from the Army in 1958 and attended the University of Michigan until he was asked to leave because of low grades.
In June 1958, Davis entered a Detroit bank and handed a teller a note that threatened her life if she didn’t give him money. According to the teller, Davis then said, “I can’t do it. I can’t do it,” then threw his thousand-dollar take on the floor. He fled from the bank only to be caught by police a block away. Due to his family’s good reputation and his lack of a criminal record, Davis received five years of probation.
While on probation, Davis obtained passport No. D236764, issued by the State Department on January 31, 1963, in New Orleans, a feat almost impossible for a convicted felon without highly placed and powerful help.
Davis’s ensuing activities took him into the murky world of anti-Castro gunrunning, and it was here Davis met Ruby. Ruby told his attorney that Davis had come to one of his nightclubs and that he had intended to go into the gunrunning business with Davis on a regular basis. However, apparently Davis’s activities were not limited to dealing with Cuban gunrunners.
At the time of the Kennedy assassination, Davis was in North Africa, allegedly setting up a deal to supply arms to the OAS. Less than a month later, he was jailed in Tangiers in connection with the assassination.
His wife told authorities that her husband was a soldier of fortune who had operated in such diverse countries as Indonesia, Algeria, and Cuba, and in the months prior to his arrest they had traveled through London, Paris, and Madrid.
According to correspondence between J. Edgar Hoover and the State Department, Moroccan security police detained Davis “because of a letter in his handwriting which referred in passing to Oswald and the Kennedy assassination.”
Kantor wrote that evidence showed Davis was freed from jail through the efforts of QJ/WIN, “the code name given by the CIA to an unsavory foreign agent with a network of Mafia contacts.” Here could be the connection not only between Davis and the CIA, but between Davis and Mertz (if indeed Mertz was QJ/WIN).
Through early 1963, Davis had contact with the anti-Castro Cubans, as confirmed by his wife and family. And he not only was in New Orleans at the same time as Oswald in the summer of 1963, but once admitted to reporter George Carter that he had used the name Oswald while in North Africa.
Based on the two men’s similar statures, ages, and features, many researchers today believe that Davis may have posed as Oswald in the months leading up to the assassination. Neither the Warren Commission nor the House Select Committee on Assassinations chose to investigate the Davis story. Whatever information Davis had was carried to his grave.
Former Wise County, Texas, sheriff Eldon Moyers said that in September 1973 Davis was attempting to steal copper wire from a construction site there when he cut into a 7,000-volt power line and was fatally electrocuted.
Through his connection to QJ/WIN, Davis certainly was in the right circles to be involved in assassination attempts. According to testimony given to the Senate
Intelligence Committee, QJ/WIN’s boss on the ZR/RIFLE team was the CIA’s
William Harvey. Harvey’s specialty was anti-Castro activities in general and the attempts to assassinate Castro in particular. Harvey, of course, was in contact with John Roselli and Florida Mafia chief Santos Trafficante Jr.
A reporter from Dallas once queried the FBI about Jean Soutre and his presence in Dallas in 1963 and was told that man was not Soutre, but another Frenchman named Michel Roux, whose name just happened to coincide with one of Soutre’s aliases.
However, the bureau, which could find nothing concerning Soutre/Mertz/Roux in 1964, could not offer any substantiating documents to support its story about the Soutre namesake.
At the heart of this labyrinth of intelligence and mob i
ntrigue is QJ/WIN, who appears to have been Michael Victor Mertz.
Soutre today has been located, working as the public-relations director for a French casino. He denied any inside knowledge of the assassination. Soutre did suggest that Mertz, an old enemy, may have been in Dallas using his name.
Virgil Bailey, an inspector for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, has told Texas researchers he remembered being ordered to pick up a Frenchman in Dallas at the time of the assassination. Bailey complied but in later years could not recall the man’s name. However, Bailey described the Frenchman to researcher Gary Shaw as a man about forty-five years old with thin, graying hair. In 1963, Soutre was about thirty-five years old and Roux was about twenty-five. Mertz, the agent connected to both intelligence and worldwide organized crime, was about forty-five years old.
The answers to questions raised by the French connection to the Kennedy assassination lie in locked files in Washington. But some assassination researchers feel the other gunman in Dealey Plaza just might have been the Frenchman known to the FBI as Michel Roux, to the French authorities as Jean Soutre, to the CIA as QJ/WIN, and to the international crime syndicate as Michael Victor Mertz.
Further evidence of the French connection to the assassination came in 1988 when Los Angeles author Steve J. Rivele claimed that after several years of investigative work he had learned the names of three French gangsters who killed Kennedy. He cited one source for his information as the imprisoned Christian David. Rivele said David claimed to have been offered a contract to kill JFK by the chief of the Marseilles Mafia, Meme Guérini. Years later Rivele stated, “My own conviction at this point is that the contract probably originated with Carlos Marcello of New Orleans who placed it in Marseilles through his colleague Santo Trafficante Jr., who had the closest relations with [Meme’s brother] Antoine Guérini.”
The three alleged hit men were Sauveur Pironti, who in 1988 was living in Marseilles and denied any connection with the assassination; Lucien Sarti, who was killed in Mexico in 1972; and a man named Bocognoni, who is believed to be living in Central or South America.
According to Rivele’s sources, Sarti wore a police uniform and fired from behind the wooden picket fence on the Grassy Knoll. Pironti and Bocognoni reportedly fired on Kennedy from a nearby building—either the old Dal-Tex Building or perhaps the Dallas County Records Building.
Pironti, questioned by European news reporters after Rivele’s book The Murderers of John F. Kennedy was published in France in 1988, denied any involvement. His denial was supported by French military authorities who said Pironti was serving at a sea post at the time of the assassination. However, later investigation failed to substantiate this alibi.
According to Rivele, David and another mobster, Michel Nicoli, claimed that Lee Harvey Oswald played no part in the assassination. Allegedly the three assassins—Pironti, Sarti, and Bocognoni—were hired to kill Kennedy by the French Union Corse, the European branch of the international crime syndicate, on orders from organized-crime figures in America. The trio of hit men flew to Mexico, where they were met at the Texas border by some Chicago mobsters who drove them to Dallas. After the assassination, the trio remained in a safe house for more than a week and then were flown out of the country.
Interestingly enough, when Rivele approached US government officials with David’s story, he was put in touch with Lucien Conein—the same man who was working with QJ/WIN, the shadowy CIA “asset.” Conein, known in Vietnam as “Black Luigi,” often bragged about his connections with the Union Corse. Conein claimed he was made an honorary member of this branch of the Sicilian Mafia after serving with Corsican partisans as an officer in the OSS and the French Foreign Legion.
It was Conein who, at the urging of Nixon aide Charles Colson, implicated President Kennedy in the assassination of Vietnam’s Diem, telling news reporters that Kennedy knew in advance of the plot to overthrow the Vietnamese president.
Asked to comment on the French connection to Kennedy’s death, James H. Lesar, vice president of the Assassination Archives and Research Center in Washington, DC, said, “I think that it’s sufficiently serious that the Department of Justice and the US Secret Service should investigate it further.”
Today it appears that no such investigation has been forthcoming, the US media has paid little attention to Christian David’s admissions, and Rivele reportedly went into hiding after receiving death threats. Today he blogs on the Internet.
The agency’s suspicious activities in Mexico City; the memos of October 1963; Morrow’s purchase of Mannlicher-Carcano rifles; and the ZR/RIFLE program, which may have included the French criminal Christian David, suggest foreknowledge of the assassination within the CIA.
In an October 3, 1963, story in the New York Times, Richard Starnes of the Scripps-Howard newspapers quoted a “high United States source” in Vietnam as comparing the CIA’s growth to a “malignancy,” which Starnes’s high-level source was not certain even the White House could still control. The official added, “If the United States ever experiences [an attempt at a coup to overthrow the government] it will come from the CIA and not the Pentagon [as the agency] represents a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone.”
Even Kennedy’s successor once voiced suspicion of the spy agency. According to the Washington Post, Marvin Watson of President Johnson’s White House staff in 1967 confided to an FBI official who wrote that “[Johnson] was now convinced there was a plot in connection with the assassination. Watson stated the President felt that CIA had had something to do with this plot.”
Naturally, the CIA long has maintained innocence in the assassination and the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that while the agency was “deficient in its collection and sharing of information both prior to and subsequent to the assassination,” the CIA was not involved.
Many researchers today are not as certain as the House committee, although, most agree that the CIA—as a government agency—probably did not plan or authorize Kennedy’s death.
G-Men (J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the Secret Service)
Anyone making a serious study of the JFK assassination must take a long, hard look at the FBI and the Secret Service. The former—as we now know—monopolized the investigation of the tragedy while the latter failed to prevent it.
The contacts between accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and the FBI are many and troubling. No fewer than seven FBI agents were associated with the twenty-four-year-old Oswald during the year and a half between his return from Russia and the assassination.
While the bureau has been especially sensitive about the JFK assassination, it also has been unintentionally helpful. During the past five decades, more than 5 million pages of documents regarding the assassination have been released by the government, often forced by Freedom of Information Act suits. The occasional nuggets of information buried in the raw ore of these documents, most from the FBI, have helped piece together aspects of the case.
Increasingly the bureau has been called to task for its handling of the JFK assassination. At least two government panels have chided the bureau for inadequacies in its assassination investigation. The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that the bureau “failed to investigate the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President.” Likewise, the Senate Intelligence Committee chastised the bureau for shoddy work in the assassination investigation. Although the Warren Commission spent several pages of its report suggesting ways to improve the performance of the Secret Service, no criticism was leveled at the FBI. This was not surprising since the Commission’s whole investigation was based on J. Edgar Hoover’s initial findings.
Ironically, it was government corruption that prompted the creation of the FBI in the first place. Just after the turn of the twentieth century, there was a growing demand in Washington to combat the “public-be-damned” attitude of the giant trusts—later to become multinational corporations—and corruption within a number of federal agenc
ies. Such abuses were the province of the Department of Justice, which Congress had never seen fit to equip with investigators. When investigations were required, treasury agents were called in on a temporary basis.
In 1907, despite objections in Congress, attorney general Charles J. Bonaparte went ahead with plans to create an investigative force, stating, “A Department of Justice with no force of permanent police in any form under its control is assuredly not fully equipped for its work.” With the approval of president Theodore Roosevelt, Bonaparte issued an order dated July 26, 1908, creating an investigative agency within the Justice Department. Less than one year later, Bonaparte’s successor, Attorney General George W. Wickersham, gave the new agency a permanent position and a name—the Bureau of Investigation.
But the new bureau could enforce only federal crimes and—outside of counterfeiting—there were hardly any federal crimes at that time. The bureau had little to do.
But in 1910 Congress, pressured by a public that was shocked and outraged by press accounts of worldwide prostitution, or “white slave” rings, unanimously passed the White Slave Traffic Act. This law became known as the Mann Act after its sponsor, representative James Robert Mann of Illinois. The law gave federal agents authority in any case in which a woman was taken across state or national boundaries for immoral purposes.
The Mann Act was loosely written, applying to female criminals as well as innocent sex “slaves.” In effect, it gave the fledgling bureau an excuse to intervene in any case in which a woman involved in criminal activity crossed state lines.
